Tag Archives: Robert Downey Sr.

ARTHOUSE THEATER DAY: PUTNEY SWOPE

Putney Swope

Putney Swope is back in a fiftieth anniversary 4K restoration screening at Alamo Drafthouse

PUTNEY SWOPE (Robert Downey, 1969)
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn
445 Albee Square West
Wednesday, September 18, 7:00
718-513-2547
drafthouse.com

The past, present, and immediate future of indie cinema are represented in the fourth annual Art House Theater Day, taking place September 18 at several venues in New York as well as around the country. Peter Strickland’s 2018 In Fabric and Brett Story’s 2019 The Hottest August will be screening at IFC; In Fabric will also be shown at Nitehawk’s Prospect Park cinema. But the film to see is the fiftieth anniversary 4K restoration of Robert Downey Sr.’s counterculture cult classic, the low-budget 1969 satire Putney Swope, playing at the Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Brooklyn and Yonkers. Downey Sr. is still alive, and this presentation includes a prerecorded introduction from the eighty-three-year-old writer-director of such other movies as Chafed Elbows, Sweet Smell of Sex, Greaser’s Palace, and Rittenhouse Square.

Downey skewers race, religion, politics, the corporate world, and Madison Ave. in the absurdist comedy, featuring a crazy cast of characters portrayed by professional actors as well as first-timers Downey found in city bars and cafés and on the street. When ad agency owner Mario Elias Sr. (David Kirk) drops dead during a meeting, the rest of the board, consisting primarily of a bunch of conniving, corrupt white men, accidentally vote the one black man, musical director Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson), to be the next chairman. Instead of stepping aside, Swope decides to take over and make radical changes, renaming the company Truth and Soul, Inc., firing white employees for any reason whatsoever, and hiring a team of Black Power men and women with no advertising experience to produce commercials that go far beyond industry standards, featuring foul language, nudity, and interracial relationships while promoting such products as Dinkleberry Frozen Chicken Pot Pie and Lucky Airlines, where one lucky passenger will win a trip to a back room with nearly naked stewardesses. However, he refuses to make ads for alcohol, toy guns, and tobacco. Putney courts favor with US president Mimeo and the first lady, portrayed by real-life husband-and-wife little people Pepi and Ruth Hermine, whose right-hand man, Mr. Borman Six (Larry Wolf), is a neo-Nazi. But power corrupts, and Swope soon becomes more militant and dictatorial, getting away with his bizarre business plan as the film turns into a fable of rebellion gone astray.

putney swope 2

Putney Swope almost didn’t get distributed. In 1969, at a special advance screening, Native New Yorker Downey, the father of Robert Downey Jr., reluctantly allowed Don Rugoff of Cinema Five in, even though Rugoff was late; afterward, Rugoff told him, “I don’t understand this movie, but I like it,” and shortly released the film to sold-out audiences. Downey and cinematographer Gerald Cotts switch between black-and-white for the main narrative and color for the television commercials, giving extra oomph to the latter, which get stranger and stranger, while Charley Cuva provides the groovy music and New Breed Inc. the chic costumes. The cast and crew had such trouble understanding Johnson’s mangled line readings that Downey dubbed in his dialogue in postproduction himself, using a raspy black voice that is way over the top; Putney Swope might be an equal opportunity offender, but it could never be made today, given the current politically correct environment.

Much of the acting is terrible, but a few familiar faces show up to offer a bit of a respite: Antonio Fargas, best known as Huggy Bear on Starsky and Hutch, plays the ever-angry Arab; Allan Arbus, who was Dr. Sidney Freedman on M*A*S*H (note that the poster to the left is a takeoff of the marketing campaign for Robert Altman’s film version of M*A*S*H) and was married to photographer Diane Arbus, is Mr. Bad News, filling in Swope on the continuing adventures of serial sex offender Sonny Williams (Perry Gewirtz); Shelley Plimpton (the mother of Martha Plimpton) and singer Ronnie Dyson, who were in Hair together, appear as the interracial couple pushing face cream; and Allen Garfield, a successful character actor in such films as The Conversation and Nashville, is Mario Elias Jr. The tall, awkward Stanley Gottlieb is a hoot as Nathan, who speaks primarily in bad jokes, while poet Donald Lev is a lone anarchist. Added to the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2016, Putney Swope — a major influence on such films as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, in which Don Cheadle plays a character named Buck Swope, Cosmo the firecracker boy is inspired by Chinese businessman Wing Soney, and Downey Sr. makes a cameo (in addition, Louis CK hosted a Q&A with Downey in LA five years ago) — holds up better than expected, despite its cutting-edge story and small details that leave no one unblemished. It’s certainly no Mad Men, but it’s still a far-out document of a critical time in American history.

MOTION(LESS) PICTURES, PGM. 1: LA JETÉE AND CHAFED ELBOWS

Chris Marker

Chris Marker’s LA JETÉE is a postapocalyptic thriller about movies and memory, told almost exclusively through still images

LA JETÉE (Chris Marker, 1962) and CHAFED ELBOWS (Robert Downey Sr., 1966)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Friday, February 28, 7:30
Series runs February 28 – March 4
212-505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

“Photography is truth,” Michel Subor tells Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, “and cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.” Anthology Film Archives explores the relationship between photography and cinema — films are called “movies” for a reason — in the new series “Motion(less) Pictures,” five days of films that make innovative use of still images in telling their stories. The festival begins February 28 at 7:30 with the inspired pairing of two wildly different low-budget, experimental works, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Robert Downey Sr.’s Chafed Elbows. Marker’s nearly half-hour postapocalyptic dystopian thriller is set in a world that calls “past and future to the rescue of the present.” Told almost completely in dark, eerie black-and-white photographs — the camera moves only once, pulling back on the opening establishing shot of the titular pier at Paris’s Orly airport, and at another point a woman opens her eyes in bed — La Jetée explores time and memory as a WWIII survivor (Davos Hanich) in the underground Palais de Chaillot galleries revisits an event that occurred with a woman (Hélène Chatelain) on the jetty. The film, referred to in the credits as “un photo-roman,” is narrated by Jean Négroni, with the only dialogue occasional unintelligible whispering by the German scientists in charge of the mysterious operation; the soundtrack also includes lush music from Trevor Duncan and a repeated thumping that mimics heartbeats. The film explores both art as memory and memory as art as well as the cinema itself; Marker (Sans Soleil, Le joli mai) references Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo when the man and woman look at the rings of a Sequoia tree, while La Jetée has gone on to influence such films as Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, the Matrix trilogy, and countless other movies and videos. It’s a mesmerizing work that brings fresh insight upon each viewing.

CHAFED ELBOWS

Walter Dinsmore (George Morgan) is harassed by a church sock sniffer (Elsie Downey) in Robert Downey Sr.’s hyperactive cinematic collage, CHAFED ELBOWS

“What’s the difference between fiction and nonfiction?” Dr. Oliver Sinfield (Lawrence Wolf), also known as Baldy, asks in Downey’s Chafed Elbows. “About a dollar,” his oddball patient, Walter Dinsmore (George Morgan), responds. Where La Jetée is enigmatic and foreboding, Chafed Elbows is crazy and hyperactive. The hour-long film, consisting of still images and live action that shifts between color and black-and-white in manic collages, follows the wacky adventures of Walter as he suffers through his annual November and January breakdowns in New York City. He has sex with his mother (Elsie Downey, Robert’s wife, who plays all the women in the movie), gives birth to money via a Caesarean through his hip, encounters a sock sniffer, shoots a cop, becomes an actor and a singer, and meets the Virgin Mary and St. Peter. Along the way, Downey (Putney Swope, Greaser’s Palace) takes on art, psychiatry, incest, race relations, sexual obsession, health care, the NYPD (which is thanked in the credits for being a “hindrance”), and the Hollywood system — the film is so low budget that he had it developed at a local drugstore. He also shares an inside joke when Walter stops by a theater that advertises Downey’s Sweet Smell of Sex, prints of which are now lost. Most of the film is dubbed extremely poorly (on purpose), with Wolf providing thirty-four voices, each one more playfully annoying than the last. And Downey is relentless in his skewering of clichés; when Dinsmore comes upon a man painting a white line down the middle of an alley street, the man says, “You gotta draw the line somewhere.” Like La Jetée, Chafed Elbows is also an examination of the past, present, and future of the art of cinema, pushing boundaries while refusing to draw any lines; they are seemingly two widely disparate works that strangely have more in common than one might think when seen together. “Motion(less) Pictures” continues through March 4 with screenings of films by Lynda Benglis, Peter Bo Rappmund, John Baldessari, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Godard, Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow, Morgan Fisher, and others.